“Making a history was
not what I wanted to do. I wanted to construct something
more powerful than that” – Claude Lanzmann

“I consider Shoah to be the greatest documentary about
contemporary history ever made, bar none, and by far the
greatest film I’ve ever seen about the Holocaust” –
Marcel Ophuls

“I would never have imagined such a combination of beauty
and horror… A sheer masterpiece” – Simone de Beauvoir

-----

The enormity of Claude Lanzmann’s mission and the
devastating nature of his subject matter have tended to
overshadow Shoah’s greatness as documentary filmmaking. Not
simply the most ambitious movie ever made about the
extermination of the Jews, Shoah is a work that treats the
issue of representation so scrupulously it might have been
inspired by the Old Testament injunction against graven
images—it’s a movie you watch in your mind's eye.

NOTE: The Vertical axis represents the bits transferred per
second. The Horizontal is the time in minutes.

Bitrates

Audio

French (Dolby Digital 2.0)

Subtitles

English

Features

Release Information:
Studio: Masters of Cinema

Aspect Ratio:
Fullscreen - 1.33:1

Edition Details:
• 184-page book featuring a masterclass with Claude Lanzmann and
an essay about the film by Stuart Liebman

DVD Release Date: February
19th, 20073 Keep Cases in a solid box

Chapters 123

Comments:

MoC's job on this DVD release of "Shoah" is
nothing less than heroic. The effort and care that went into the digital
presentation of this astounding work of art is visible everywhere in
this package, from the newly translated subtitles to the beautifully
assembled booklet.

For the transfer of "Shoah", MoC did their own encode of an expensive
telecine that the French owners of the film created in the late 90s/00s.
Therefore it differs from New Yorker's R1 transfer. The image has its
expectable scratches, dirt and grain but still looks quite clear and
sharp. "Shoah", which Lanzmann shot with portable 16mm cameras, will
probably never look better than it does here.

The 2.0 soundtrack fulfills its purpose as well. A film so filled with
talk as "Shoah" demands a good audio track and MoC have provided the
film with just that. Ambient and background noise sounds just as well
and creates the kind of atmosphere Lanzmann wanted his film to have.

NOTE: in regards to the discussed audio
sync issue - we have this from one of the principals of Masters of
Cinema: "The audio sync: this is due to a minor problem with the
masters we received, and it's found on the French edition as well. The
sound is out of sync by about two frames for a couple of minutes in a
few places on DISC 1. The other discs are fine..." --Trond / MoC

MoC put a lot of care into their newly created
subtitles, which are more accurate than they've ever been. They are, of
course, optional.

With a film like "Shoah" one doesn't really miss bonus material. In a
way the film comments on its own making and we get comments from
Lanzmann in the booklet.

Every new MoC release proofs that no other DVD company in the world, not
even Criterion, produces better booklets. This should be called a book
anyway, as it is filled with a chapter guide through the four discs, an
introductory essay by Stuart Liebman, a gallery of all the interviewees
in the film and a masterclass transcript with Claude Lanzmann, all on
184 pages. It is a very rewarding companion piece to the film.

To review DVDs like this one is a pleasure. We get one of the most
important films of the century in a definitive DVD edition, looking and
sounding better than it ever did, featuring flawlessly translated and
assembled subtitles and a booklet that could hardly be more informative.
This is, in my humble opinion, a truly essential DVD release.